Reading the President
WESTLAKE, DONALD E.
Reading the President From Tom Sawyer to commander in chief. BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is only secondarily a person. Primarily, he is a symbol of what America thinks about...
...Except, of course, Tom Sawyer...
...There was a formal dinner on Friday evening at the Library of Congress, a magnificent hall, at which we sat at a table next to that of the Bushes...
...Frequently, in the two days of the festival, president Bush was at his wife's side, but he never said one word in public...
...We could not ask for more...
...So the more recent two presidents were irresponsible men...
...The new suit does not fit perfectly, but that's all right...
...He had to become a grownup...
...Over the weekend, there were readings, discussions, exhibits, all on the subject of books...
...Bush was a charming, intelligent, passionately involved hostess...
...Sixty writers of all kinds, from children's book authors to historians, from mystery novelists to poets, gathered in Washington that weekend at Mrs...
...In the first day or two after September 11, George W. Bush could be seen floundering, breathing open-mouthed like a fish, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do...
...We attendees came to honor the idea of the book, but by the end of the Donald E. Westlake's latest novel, Put a Lid on It, has some Washington moments...
...As it happens, the one time in my life I was inside the White House was on September 8, 2001...
...In very different ways, both played Tom Sawyer, the bad boy who isn't really bad...
...weekend we had all learned to honor Mrs...
...Through it all, Mrs...
...A German friend once told me that, when he was a child, the first word one thought of in connection with Americans was "candor...
...Three days after that White House breakfast, those inhuman creatures with their own death-soaked values called America's attention to themselves, as they'd been trying to do for years...
...He grinned, he winked, he waved at friends, he showed how proud he was of the little lady, but he never revealed a personality of his own...
...President Bush is performing a demonstration of stern determination, and is certainly doing it well enough to pass...
...We asked him to change roles in mid-performance, and he did it...
...Which meant that the symbol at the top had to change...
...For thirty years, America has been wounded, defensive, insecure, a braggart, and a bully because it was no longer sure of itself...
...After Vietnam, that was no longer the first word anyone thought of...
...Vietnam had broken America's belief in its own decency, the belief that had made it so useful and so cordial in the world for so long...
...America became closer to what it had been in 1960, self-confident without arrogance...
...In retrospect, we can see that for some time what America wanted was an end to responsibility...
...In the first place, they finally brought an end to the Vietnam war...
...That weekend, Laura Bush presented the first National Book Festival, based on a regional book festival she had run for six years in Texas...
...With one slap across the face on September 11, that changed...
...A former teacher and librarian, she had pushed the idea of this festival in Texas, and now she was sponsoring it in Washington, out of a conviction in the values of literacy...
...The nation of the peace Corps, not Grenada...
...Bush's invitation to promote literacy and the joy of reading, all culminating in a Saturday breakfast at the White House...
...Primarily, he is a symbol of what America thinks about itself, what it wants, and what it believes...
...This time, they succeeded, but they accomplished far more than they set out to do...
...Bush...
...But, more rapidly than I expected, he realized what he had to do...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 38
